The present invention, in some embodiments thereof, relates to deposition of liquids and, more particularly, but not exclusively, to deposition of liquids by a printing system, e.g., a three-dimensional printing system.
Additive manufacturing is generally a process in which a three-dimensional (3D) object is manufactured utilizing a computer model of the objects. Such a process is used in various fields, such as design related fields for purposes of visualization, demonstration and mechanical prototyping, as well as for rapid manufacturing.
The basic operation of any additive manufacturing system consists of slicing a three-dimensional computer model into thin cross sections, translating the result into two-dimensional position data and feeding the data to control equipment which manufacture a three-dimensional structure in a layerwise manner.
Additive manufacturing entails many different approaches to the method of fabrication, including three-dimensional printing, laminated object manufacturing, fused deposition modeling and others.
In three-dimensional printing processes, for example, a building material is dispensed from a printing head having a set of nozzles to form layers of deposited material on a supporting structure. Depending on the building material, the layers may then be cured or solidified using a suitable device. The building material may include modeling material, which forms the object, and support material, which supports the object as it is being built. Various three-dimensional printing techniques exist and are disclosed in, e.g., U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,259,962, 6,569,373, 6,658,314, 6,850,334, 7,183,335 7,209,797, 7,225,045, 7,300,619, 7,479,510, 7,500,846, 7,658,976, and 7,962,237, all of the same Assignee, the contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference.
Some three-dimensional printing systems include two inkjet heads, where one inkjet deposits the modeling material and another inkjet head deposits the support material. More sophisticated printing systems are capable of printing objects made of two or more modeling materials. These systems include two or more heads for depositing different materials, allowing the designer to control the mechanical, thermal and/or aesthetic properties of various regions of the printed object. Such type of three-dimensional printing system is disclosed in U.S. Published Applications No. 20100191360, the contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference.